«But my take: Gaikai had superior technology & a superior business strategy. They were mostly a B2B platform enabling game publishers to deliver via Internet streaming their traditional games built for game consoles. That let people play popular titles, for example, directly in Facebook. By not forcing the publisher to go through a Gaikai portal where they tried to control customers, they engendered trust from the publishers.

OnLive’s tried to build a direct-to-consumer model led by an allegedly maniacal CEO who in the end fired all of his employees with no severance and then tried to relaunch the business with a subset. This is a riveting read and tale of ego, bad business practice and shady ethical behavior – if the article is even 50% true. I don’t know the company or the details first hand. But apparently the B2C model meant that many publishers didn’t want OnLive to carry their full inventory. And so they never got consumer adoption. Reportedly they only ever had 1,600 concurrent users despite burning through a ton of cash.»